May Break My Bones
by Prof. Lemonade
Summary: Mulder compares Scully to types of stones. A spot of introspection and intimacy post-Season 7 Episode 2. She was much more than just a touchstone, after all.


"You were my constant. My touchstone."

"And you were mine."

* * *

He touches her back to remind himself that he's real; that she's real; that he's not strapped to some metal table in the underbelly of the world; and that she's not bandaged up to the nines in some damned hospital somewhere between here and the ends of the earth.

(He still feels clamps around his wrists and ankles, still cutting into his skin with ghost-like lucidity. He has to touch her to make sure he's not still there . Somewhere. Anywhere that isn't here.)

He doesn't know if she realises it - the way he lets his knuckles graze the small of her back, or his fingers dally between her shoulder blades when they cross the threshold of an open door - and Hell, half the time he's sure he doesn't either.

It's a magnetism; a ferrous addiction; a pull he's only aware of when he thinks too much, or not at all.

She would scold him if he told her as much. She would roll her eyes and sigh, or settle him with that look she all too often pulls that make him feel as much a child as not one as she folds her arms tight across her chest.

Mulder, crystals aren't magnetic. That's physics 101.

He knows that. Crystals aren't magnetic. Aluminium, iron, copper, nickel, yes. Rare earth metals, sometimes. But not quartz. Not silicon dioxide. Not crystal.

And yet, her back is solid like one, and her edges are sharp like one, and the icy-blue of her eyes catches him off-guard like one; her brand of crystal circumvents in an electric field, and he is trapped unwittingly in her gravity without fail. He touches her because she defies all sense and reason, and when has he not spent his life chasing the quasi-magic?

 _You're wrong, Scully._

There are some things science just can't prove.

* * *

He touches her back because he can't help himself. He feels vertexes and corners and shifting muscles; he feels the earth move beneath only his fingertips.

She used to flinch when he did it at first, as if the thought of someone touching her like that - be it unassumingly or selfishly, he's yet to decide - shocked her with some charge of static that lept through her like a current.

It's likely, he supposes. If she's magnetic, she probably conducts electricity too, and he knows he all but bristles manic with it sometimes. She's told him as much.

She doesn't startle at his clumsy fingers any more. Usually, she doesn't acknowledge them, eyes forward and steadfast, focussed on the target, on the case, on the science. It's just a habit. Careless fingertips will not easily erode her. Not when she's weathered so much worse.

But sometimes - on the days when she's a little weary, and a little hard-done by the world, and he thinks the purple bags beneath her eyes from too little sleep are the colour and the weight of onyx stones, she'll relax into his fleeting touch, leaning into the palm of his hand. Smile a bit. Let her eyes flutter closed like she's remembering something fond and unblemished.

He smiles to himself. It's a little bit indulgent, but he gets to steal a firmer feel. She's rocklike. She's real. She's there.

Still there.

* * *

She's not just made of crystal. It seems to strike him all at once, all the little facets of her, not long after he's grown accustomed to letting his fingers dawdle across her spine when they walk, as a way to settle the hammering that never dies between his temples.

All her little quirks - the ones he's filed away in that space in his head that he too often turns to when things become too much, too loud, too insurmountable - suddenly make so much sense.

It's not like she didn't make sense before - she always has. She's logic, she's reason, she's solid, she's real, she's real, she's real-

But things seem to fall into place.

Her back _is_ crystal - that's something he can ascertain. He admires it through her blazer when she walks ahead of him, shoulders square and purposeful, feet marching to a headstrong drum beat that has their colleagues scurrying to the side in the hallways of the bureau. He wonders how the cleave of her shoulder blades catch the light when she's home alone and the sun creeps through the blinds in her bedroom and paints her in stripes of black and gold. But he also wonders if beneath her suit jacket, her back is translucent; he wonders if she lets all the light shine through her and refract across the hardwood of her apartment. He wonders if she intentionally tries to keep something like that hidden beneath coarsely-carved planes and edges, out of fear that someone might believe her to be less than infrangible.

(He's seen her bare back before - dozens of times, if not more. He's always admired the whiteness of her skin, sometimes tinged with guilt over the scars that grew to mark it as chips in her pallor; and sometimes with the heat of something magmous in his abdomen. But it's never been enough; he's always adverted his eyes. The seconds he steals are theft. He'll wait until she tells him he can look, even if some part of him believes he wouldn't have to ask.)

* * *

Her eyes are diamonds, so pale they border on the white. Transparent, he thinks. She sees him for who he is, and he sees her for who she tries not to let people see. It's a cliche, he knows, but he's been riddled in cliches for as long as he's known her, and for as long as he's looked up at the sky and seen spaceships, and not stars.

Boron-doped diamond. Very few impurities. That's what makes them blue. (He took a class in geology at Oxford, which is enough to consider himself somewhat of an expert. That, and the number of hospital beds they've woken up in, to the clench of each other's hands, and the embrace of each other's eyes, relief palpably set-in-stone upon their lips. He's a God-damned pro at this now. Emphasis on the damned.)

He likes her eyes, beyond sloppy words that feel forced and alien upon his tongue (too graceless for what binds them, and too bold for who he knows she isn't), for the simple reason that diamonds don't chip. Every other part of her might have broken, and been melded back together by some clumsy welder's hands - too often his, he reasons - and her small frame may seem so fragile on those days that end with her bundled in his arms, or him in her arms, or them in each other's arms - but her eyes remain a constant, fissureless.

He sees facets; veins of blue and silver; glimmers in the sunlight that may or may not be a tear she flicks haphazardly from her lash line when she thinks nobody's looking; galaxies that he would lose himself to chase, if he hasn't already. He sees things made in the fire, which is apt, he supposes. Diamonds are wrought under temperatures that would make his eyes water - if not more.

She breaks, and he breaks, and their bodies might crumble, and yet still with just one look she can root him to the ground.

(It's a blessing, her eyes. Maybe he would have drifted off into space a long time ago without them.)

* * *

Within her ribcage, she has this volcanic rock. Cool and solid to the touch, but burning and molten when she wills it to be. She has fire in her heart; fierce and igneous and magnificent like obsidian gems wrought in the heart of simpering lava. People dip their fingers in and get scorched; people cower from her glares. It's hard to get close.

When she bubbles over, he's too often caught between fear and awe, as if he's standing on the very edge of a volcano and looking in. When she ruptures, there's a part of him that wonders if the world's gonna end. She's a force of nature when she wants to be, and he thinks he's just a little bit mesmerised by it all.

(Not a little bit. A lot. A lot .)

* * *

The quirk in her lips is something precious, like a ruby (courageous), or an amethyst (clear-headed), or a sapphire (honesty; loyalty; purity; trust), or something just as cliche. (See. He can't escape them.) (He's still trying to pin-down a good metaphor for the dimples at the corner of her lips that does her justice, and doesn't make her seem commonplace.)

People talk about smiles all the time: Romance movies are awash with it. The friends he is meant to keep at his age would tell him as much around bottles of beer at an overpriced bar each night after work. His mother would tell him about it if he called more often for the purpose of a just because. _His smile was like nothing else I'd ever seen, Fox._

 _Her smile is dazzling._

 _His smile was a million bucks._

 _I fell in love with her smile at first glance. There was no hope for me._

He never really understood; he would pass by jeweler's windows on the way to work sometimes, and steal a glance that really mattered very little. He would see precious stones set in rings and necklaces, and maybe wonder if one day he would be able to buy something like that for his mum to replace those cheap, fake-crystal earrings she still has from the mid-seventies - but he would always keep on walking, never stopping. Head in the clouds; the office waiting for him, empty.

Oh, but now .

Now, it's all he can do not to walk through the store door each and every morning and buy one of those damn little rings, inset with a ruby and gold embellishment, just so he can march into the office not-empty, set it down on his desk, and tell her to her face: this. This is nothing compared to you. The cheek of it all.

It almost makes him angry. (The ring, not her smile, that is.) (It's like it's trying to be her, to emulate her, but it could never be. It pales in comparison. The presumption makes him mad. It's the thought that some dumb rock could have the audacity to place itself upon the same page as Dana Scully's smile. As if. Sheets of gold would sell for less.)

* * *

Gold. Yes.

Gold is the colour of the fine-chain cross around her neck; gold is the colour that flashes across his eyes when he thinks of her lips pressed against his forehead; gold is the thing her hair sometimes does in the sunlight, especially in his office - their office - at a certain time of day. It's around eleven in the morning when the sun appears over the marauding bulk of the buildings yonder, and manages to refract through the grubby windows into their little hollow in the cellar of the world. She'll be perched on the corner of his desk - and maybe he'll be sat behind it, nose in some old newspaper, or maybe he'll be strolling in through the door, late, of course, because when is he not - and he'll look up, and see the sheen of something remarkable catching copper tones in her hair: aurum, soft, and untarnishable.

She looks at him funny and tilts her head to the side and asks him if he's okay. He'll tell her that he is, even if he doesn't tell her why. She'll roll her eyes and smile, and he'll be once again enamoured by the thought of a domesticity he never would have offered himself six years ago (her abduction); four years ago (her cancer); however many days ago (his back flat against a metal table).

* * *

Her touch is limestone.

Actually, a lot of her is limestone. Limestone takes many forms, and she's never been one to be pinned down by just one word; calcite, and quartz, and dolomite, and barite. Crystalline, and granular, and mineral, and structural.

(But if he had to pick one word, it would be constant . She's always there, in one form or another. By his side, or in his head. Constant. Because she is . She has to be. He loses his way without her beneath his feet or in his bones or on his hands.)

One builds temples out of limestone. Churches, steeples, holy ground. The pyramids are limestone, he knows. Look how long they've lasted. She will last longer. He believes that. He has to.

But limestone is soluble in water, and that's a funny thing, really, because he's not exactly sure if she's the one who more readily dissolves, or him. (She cries, and he dissolves. It's irreversible. A chemical exchange that is really no part exchange, even if she would scold him otherwise. He doesn't get those parts of himself back.)

She leaves chalk upon his skin, sometimes. It's what reminds him that she's human, and not something akin to the files that crowd his desk on all days bar none. She leaves traces of herself on him and the places that she's been. She clearly doesn't realise it, but he sees the film of her on the dial pad of his desk phone; on the lip of the mug she drunk from once and that he never washed up, left in the sink of his apartment; in the myriad of footprints that litter the halls of the Washington headquarters. She leaves her mark upon his world, and it reminds him that it is both big, and infinitesimally small.

She is rock and ice and atoms and stars, all the same as she is a fine-powdered dust, loose sand upon the beach, malleable beneath the weight of the world. She doesn't break; she doesn't crumble. She doesn't budge. But she erodes. With time, with rain, with want, perhaps.

* * *

When limestone recrystallises, it becomes marble, and that's what her hands are, statuesque and lithe all the same; delicate, gentle, and yet carved by something that could have him believing that it's not his hard-won and harder-lost truth that is at the centre of the universe, but art. Her fingers are beautiful, and sometimes he stares, and usually it's at the mundane things, such as how she holds a pen so tight that her knuckles grow a little white, or how gossamer the flick of her wrist is when she tucks a stray strand of hair behind her ear.

Her hands are marble too, and not only for their whiteness and their beauty, but for the cool pallor held in her palms when she cups his cheeks and tells him in not so many words at all, all the things he's afraid she doesn't want asked.

It's not a harsh coldness. Yes, it's some parts sterile, and some parts crystalline, but that's who she is, and that's why he marvels at her.

He remembers the feeling of her hands upon his face, whilst his forehead was bandaged up in itchy gauze, and there was still a dull, pounding ache in his left temple, and his New York Yankees' cap fit a bit too snuggly upon his head - her hands had been so cool against his simmering skin. So cool, and so sure, despite the wobble in her voice and in her jaw.

(How is it that she can quench him with just one touch?)

(And sometimes, not even that.)

She had slid the pads of her thumbs across his lips, and they had been cold too, but smooth and whorl-less, if all too fleeting. She hadn't lingered, ducking beneath his arm and into his apartment, but he had closed his eyes, and for a moment wondered: if marble had a taste, like iron is ferrous and blood-like in a tang on the back of the throat, then it would taste of her, or she of it. Someone, or something, or just some great cosmic coincidence, worked very hard to cast and carve her this way. It makes him believe in fate - as if he didn't already - but hands like those don't get made by accident.

He catches himself recalling her thumbs ghosting across his lips, sometimes. Mainly when he's in bed at night and can't sleep because insomnia has him like a vice, and he can't be near her to run his fingers over her back and ground himself to the reality which he struggles in vain to orbit. He wonders what kissing marble would be like.

(Somehow, he imagines it kind of holy.)

* * *

It's not just her hands that are marble (but it's her hands with which he has the most experience, and which he loves the most).

He thinks her stomach is like marble too; white, but mottled with grey swirls and streaks in the form of one old scar or a few. A bullet wound here, a burn mark there. Cracks in the rock. Most of them are his doing, one way or another. ( So shatter. Explode like sparks of flint in the dark and take another bullet. Save her from the serendipity of scars. Because it will save you from shattering her, even if she tells you that she won't - she won't ever, she will follow you into Hell, jaw firm and lips terse and mettle too real .)

He's only seen her stomach a few times - it's not his place to look, after all; and nor can he will himself to rake his eyes over the fragments he's caused her - but he remembers Antarctica mostly, and how in the blight of the cold, the marks on her bare stomach had stood out like poppy bruises. (He'd draped her quickly in his clothes; there had been no time for staring. Had to stay warm. Had to survive. Had to get her back alive.)

He imagines her thighs are a similar story too; white marble, rivered not with scars, but the etchings of stretchmarks and blue-blood veins, all equally fascinating and magnanimous. That's where he imagines her marble is at its softest - on her inner thighs - and his curiousity does get the better of him. Sometimes, he imagines his fingers dallying there, and it burns him down low in his gut. It would be smooth; no sharp, defensive edges and visceral vertexes like the rest of her.

(Which he likes just as much, he should add. Sometimes, there's a thrill in being cut by her. There's an ephemeral sort of sanctity in knowing he would bleed out for her any day, even if it were she who lacerated him. God, it would be so real . He would bleed and bleed and bleed.)

(Maybe one day he'll bleed enough to make up for all that he's made her spill across the years.)

* * *

They're in Skinner's office now, and his head is still bound in bandages. There's a twinge just behind his ear, and his words still feel soft in his throat, as if he's still remembering how to talk. It's his first day back from designated leave - he wanted to be back sooner, but promises from Scully to keep his office in order, and the derision of Skinner's withering glare has kept him at home. The first day home, he'd slept for twenty hours straight, which is probably more sleep than he gets in an average week, but since then, insomnia has been at his beck and call.

So had she, of course. He'd frightened himself out of some dopey daze more than once to the feel of her cool fingers against his forehead, and her hair - unwashed and unkempt and out-of-place - falling across the furrow in her brow. He hadn't known how she'd gotten in - he probably gave her a key some time, long ago, or maybe she bust in through the door - who rightly knows - but he had sighed into the masonry of her fingers unabashedly, craning his neck and letting his eyes flutter shut to chase the quenching cold of her smooth palm.

"Scully," he had said, probably lucid and delirious to boot, "What's your favourite type of stone?"

"One too many knocks to the head have caught up with you, Mulder," she had said plainly, nudging him in the thigh to make him budge over on the sofa. She had shimmied a little closer; her hip pressed against his hip; he had felt the hew of her pelvis, bony and calciate, against his softer skin. It had been comforting. "I was hoping you might have taken a turn for the better. A new, serious you."

" Scully ," he had pressed again, a little softer, but a little firmer. He had scowled at her in the way she knows he can never really be mad with her. "I'm serious. Humour me."

She had pursed her lips into a thin line, and leant over him, sweeping his floppy hair from his forehead. She hadn't looked him in the eyes, her own diamond gaze scoring across the lines in his brow, inspecting them curiously. In his skin, they're his age catching up with him; in hers, they're erosion in the rock.

"My favourite stone?" she had repeated, her voice low and throaty. Her words had been slow, something like a lullaby, the crone of a late-night radio. It had probably been late; he had only kept time by her appearances and disappearances from his side. He had felt cradled by her mantle of earth and dust.

"Moonstone," she had said at last. "I like moonstones. My-"

She had paused, looked away, and steeled herself. Not in a way that anyone would notice - she's too demure for that - but he's not anyone anymore. He has a penchant for alloys, and knows she fears to rust.

"Melissa used to have this ring," she had said, toying with the knuckles of one hand, "I used to steal it all the time from her jewellery box, but she would always catch me. It was beautiful."

Moonstone . He had almost smiled. It was the perfect answer. Almost too perfect, in fact; still far, far better than anything he's likened her to thus far.

He turns to look at her again now, here, in Skinner's office, and not in the memory of them together on his couch; she faces forward, eyes fixed somewhere outside Skinner's window, pinpointed in the middle distance of whatever it is that fills her head. He can dawdle on the facet of her jaw, on the arch of her nose, and in the pearls of her cheeks, without feeling guilty for gazing.

The adularescence would suit her, he thinks. Maybe it _is_ her. The moonstone. All blues and whites and translucent clarity, rising and falling with the tides of self-belief; maybe she had picked it as her answer because she knew he would obsess over it. Maybe she guesses it's now his favourite sort of stone too. Maybe it's the sort of thing she knows full-well that he's drawn to: mysticism and the reaches of the cosmos.

Somehow, it makes her feel a tiny bit further away from him than before. He's always been the sort of man to leap at the moon. His chest feels tight; maybe there's that chalk again, clogging up his throat.

Her back is pressed ramrod straight against the throne of the cheap-leather chair, and he can't exactly ask her to lean forward so that he might lay his hand against the protrusions of her spine through her suit jacket. (She tells him that he's not selfish, that he cares too much about the fate of the world to be selfish, but he is. He is, he is. He needs an anchor. He needs to touch.) (He can't.)

And so he does the next best thing: he covers her hand on her thigh with his own, and gives her marble fingers a gentle squeeze. She turns to look at him like she's seen a ghost - and it's a look he knows very well indeed, fraught with disbelief, and her mouth a parted O - but all he does is shrug. Maybe quirk his lips a little. It's maybe a little bold, even for him, but it doesn't quite feel that way. It feels steadfast.

A tiny crease forms between her brows; a crag in her sediment.

"Mulder?"

"Scully." He repeats her name like a childish retort, defensive to a question that wasn't even asked. He doesn't know why he is - defensive, that is. Maybe he's trying to emulate her, but she's always been far better at statuism than him.

"Are you okay?"

It makes him smile. She doesn't say: _what are you doing?_ , but then again, he never quite expected her to. She wants to know if something's wrong. He squeezes her fingers again, and notices her thigh feels warm. Another page for his anthology of her.

"'M fine," he says simply, tilting his head and shooting her with a school boy look. "Just checking."

"Just checking what?" She asks, eyebrows raised and wide eyes transparent, as if she can look straight through him and see the truth. She doesn't drag her hand out from underneath his. She's very still, and he wouldn't anticipate any less.

"A theory," he says. _I'm real. You're real. We're both still here, still beating._

He hears Skinner outside, talking to his secretary, and knows he only has a moment longer to rob blind before she pulls her fingers away from his grasp, and stares forward, all curt nods and derisive hums, whilst all he'll be able to do is bore holes into her portrait, knowing that he is no geologist and that he's still scared of how to handle her. (Not because he doesn't know how . But because- well, it goes unspoken, doesn't it? Even between them. Wanting what they're not sure they deserve.)

"A theory," Scully repeats then, her tone dry, but not dismissive. Her lips have quirked a little (there it is again: his ruby stone), and there's less surprise on her face now; she seems serene.

She turns her hand over beneath his, and their palms lay flush; she threads her fingers with his, and he can't help but notice that she feels warmer than usual today, pliable in a way that crystal shouldn't be. She squeezes his fingers back, and returns the sentiment in the moments before Skinner sighs his way through the door and she pulls away like she's still figuring out if she wants to be caught. Would it hurt to try?

 _Sticks and stones, Scully. Sticks and stones._


End file.
